Sometimes, You Just Need To Let Yourself Grieve A Little

I was doing my best to keep the kids entertained yesterday on our surprise snow day, and indulging David by watching a couple of his favorite YouTube videos with him (he loves anything with cats - "No no no Cat" is one of his favorites). I left him at the computer and went to get dinner started, then returned to check on him a few minutes later.

He had opened up the video file on the computer, and was watching old home videos I'd made. He asked me to watch with him and I did for a bit. It's always amazing to me to see how far he's come. I have videos of him at two where he's almost entirely non-verbal, and at three and four when he only knew a handful of words and tantrumed so much. When you have a child with autism, the growth is in millimeters some days. It's easy to forget how far they've advanced, in the scheme of things.

He settled on a few favorites, playing them over and over again. One of them featured Peter, wrestling with David and Anna on the floor. David was two and Anna was four and they were attacking him with gusto. They rolled and flipped and tickled and laughed and I laughed, too from behind the camera. There was a moment when Anna was playing the top of Peter's head like a drum and David was pulling his pants leg - Peter's eyes met mine and he gave me that good-natured "Do you see what I put up with?" look that always made me smile. It was incredibly poignant to watch that again, remembering when we used to be a team in this thing we called parenting, and in this thing we called life.

After dinner, Anna, David and I hung our decorations on the tree and the melancholy hit me again. Our ornaments were all purchased on trips we took or have symbolic meaning for something important that happened that year. I relived vacations and milestones in our lives and felt myself blinking back the tears and smiling too hard so that the kids didn't see how it was affecting me.

Finally, they rolled into bed and I rolled into mine. Not long after, I put my face in the pillow and had myself a good, hard cry. I guess sometimes, no matter how much time has passed or how together you think you've got yourself, you just need to grieve a little.

Today's another day, and life goes on.

Does that happen to you, still? Even if you never want your ex back, do you miss the family that you used to be sometimes?

About The Author

Ellie DeLano

Ellie DeLano is a parenting and relationship blogger, a freelance writer, a full-time working single mom, and frequently exhausted. She's slogging her way through the world of single parenting, mid-life dating and reinventing herself with a pop-tart in one hand and a glass of wine in the other.

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